Pointing the Finger at the White House

Torture Watch

Scott Horton blogs for Harper's: "One of the major breakthroughs of the first McCain--Obama debate on Friday night passed with almost no notice. Both John McCain and Barack Obama, in characterizing their opposition to the Bush Administration's interrogation program, called it torture. To those who have tracked this question with any care, there is no doubt whatsoever that the Bush Administration pursued torture as a matter of policy. However, ferocious blowback from the administration has up to this point intimidated the American media from calling things by proper names."

Here's what McCain said at the debate: "[W]e've got to -- to make sure that we have people who are trained interrogators so that we don't ever torture a prisoner ever again."

Obama responded: "I give Senator McCain great credit on the torture issue, for having identified that as something that undermines our long-term security."

Mary McNamara writes in the Los Angeles Times: "The Oscar-winning documentary 'Taxi to the Dark Side,' which debuts at 9 tonight on HBO, is a hair-raising, stomach-clenching reminder of why documentaries, and HBO, were invented. . . .

"Far from a partisan attack on the Bush administration, many of the voices in 'Taxi to the Dark Side' are Republicans and/or military personnel, including some of the soldiers who participated in the torture. The most damning evidence against the architects of the new torture 'guidelines' -- Vice President Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-White House legal advisor Alberto R. Gonzales -- comes from their own lips."

India Watch

Glenn Kessler writes in The Washington Post: "The House overwhelmingly gave final approval yesterday to a landmark civil nuclear agreement with India, putting the Bush administration in reach of a substantial foreign policy achievement.

"The legislation, which passed 298 to 117, still faces obstacles in the Senate, where it has been approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but several senators have blocked it from coming to the floor for debate. The administration has pressed for final action before Congress adjourns, even though the 2006 bill that gave preliminary approval to the deal called for a much longer period of discussion and debate. . . .

"The deal, which has been fiercely opposed by nuclear proliferation experts, would give New Delhi access to U.S. nuclear technology for the first time since it conducted a nuclear test in 1974."

Pakistan Watch

Andrew J. Bacevich writes in a Los Angeles Times op-ed: "President Bush will leave office without concluding either of the two wars he initiated after 9/11. Now, in the waning months of his administration, the president seems intent on expanding his 'global war on terror' still farther. To the existing fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, he is adding a third: Pakistan.

"Eclipsed perhaps only by Iraq, Pakistan ranks in the very top tier of the Bush administration's foreign policy blunders."

North Korea Watch

David E. Sanger writes in the New York Times: "The Bush administration is dispatching its chief North Korea negotiator, Christopher Hill, to Pyongyang this week in a last-ditch effort to rescue what the White House had hoped would be a singular foreign policy achievement: an accord leading to the country's nuclear disarmament.

"The rapid decision to send Mr. Hill to the North Korean capital, days after North Korea broke the seals that United Nations inspectors placed on its equipment and said it was restarting a facility to manufacture bomb-grade plutonium, seemed to underscore the administration's desperation to restore an accord that took most of President Bush's second term to negotiate and implement. Mr. Hill, one administration official said, is 'flying blind,' hoping to get a previous agreement back on track."

The New York Times editorial board writes: "Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration hard-liners have never wanted to negotiate with North Korea. For six years they managed to block any serious talks. During that time North Korea produced enough plutonium for at least four additional weapons and tested a nuclear weapon.

"Over the past two years, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a competent team of diplomats have been running the show. But now it looks as if Mr. Cheney and Co. are back in charge. The administration is insisting that before it will remove North Korea from the terrorism list, Pyongyang must first accept a plan for verifying its nuclear programs that only a state vanquished in war might accept."

Campaign Watch

Nicholas D. Kristof writes in his New York Times opinion column: "Although he is frantically trying to distance himself from President Bush, Mr. McCain, by his own accounting, would be more Bushian in foreign policy than even Mr. Bush is now. While Mr. Bush has been forced to accept more sensible policies in his second term, Mr. McCain has become steadily more of a neocon in the cowboy role that Mr. Bush played in his first term, prone to solving problems with stealth bombers rather than United Nations resolutions."

Abramson on Woodward

From New York Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson's review on Bob Woodward's latest book: "In contrast to his other Bush volumes, 'The War Within' does provide interstitial analysis and judgments throughout. It also renders an extremely harsh final appraisal of President Bush. In a stinging epilogue, Woodward concludes: 'For years, time and again, President Bush has displayed impatience, bravado and unsettling personal certainty about his decisions. The result has too often been impulsiveness and carelessness and, perhaps most troubling, a delayed reaction to realities and advice that run counter to his gut.'

"Some will deem this judgment obvious and long overdue. They will also come away hungry if they expect Woodward to grapple with the central question surrounding the Iraq war: whether it was launched and fought with just cause. Still, Woodward has traveled far since the publication of his first two volumes; in both he viewed events through an overly heroic prism in the aftermath of 9/11. In his third volume, 'State of Denial,' the author took a mulligan. Writing as the insurgency in Iraq was spinning out of control, he rewound the story back to the beginning and offered a much tougher account of Bush's war policies and their executors.

"In 'The War Within,' more judgmental still, President Bush shrinks in stature as the narrator's presence grows. Cynics will say that Woodward waited until the last book to fully criticize the president and his closest advisers because he no longer needs access to them."

Legacy Watch

Stanley Fish blogs for the New York Times with the following prediction: "[W]ithin a year of the day he leaves office, and no matter who succeeds him, George W. Bush will be a popular public figure, regarded with affection and a little nostalgia even by those who voted against him and thought he was the worst president in our history."

Why? Because Bush is so darn likable. "We'll not be depending on him," Fish writes, "so we'll be free to like him."

Cartoon Watch

Clay Bennett on a fitting Bush tribute, Daryl Cagle on Bush's offer, RJ Matson on Bush's new ownership society, Paul Zanetti on the time to panic, and Adam Zyglis on fool me once.